all the information, none of the junk | biotech • healthcare • life sciences

Alkermes Aims for Psychiatric Drug That Won’t Pack on the Pounds

Eli Lilly once made a fortune on a schizophrenia drug that helped a lot of people, but came with a nasty side effect—weight gain. Now Dublin, Ireland- and Waltham, MA-based Alkermes is wagering that it can get the benefits of the original treatment without causing patients to add so many extra pounds.

Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) is announcing to shareholders today that it has a new combo-drug strategy to improve upon Eli Lilly’s olanzapine (Zyprexa). This idea, to combine olanzapine with Alkermes’ proprietary compound ALKS33, is actually way beyond the “we’ve got an idea” stage. Based on encouraging results from a short-term study of 106 healthy volunteers, Alkermes says it is getting ready to take this compound into the second of three stages of clinical trials normally required for FDA approval.

There’s a big potential market here if Alkermes can convince doctors and payers that it has something better than a cheap generic. Eli Lilly’s original olanzapine generated more than $5 billion in sales in 2010, the last full year of sales before its patent expired. The market was huge then, even after researchers began to better understand the drug’s side effect profile. One federally funded study from 2009 showed that patients who started on the drug, at an average weight of 118 pounds, ended up gaining 18.7 pounds on average after about 11 weeks on olanzapine. Despite those results, and evidence that showed olanzapine caused the biggest weight gains in its class, it continues to be widely prescribed in its generic form.

Alkermes, knowing this, designed a study in 106 healthy volunteers (who don’t have schizophrenia), and randomly assigned them to get standard olanzapine or olanzapine plus ALKS33—a combo it is now calling ALKS3831. Although the volunteers were only followed for three weeks, researchers quickly saw a difference in weight gain. Patients on the Alkermes drug combo gained an average of 2.5 kilograms (about 5.5 pounds) compared with 3.4 kilograms (7.5 pounds) in the comparison group. The result is far from iron-clad proof that the new regimen offers a real medical benefit, but it was statistically significant—meaning researchers can say with confidence the result isn’t a fluke. The results were encouraging enough for Alkermes to invest its resources in a bigger and longer-term study of schizophrenia patients that will begin in 2013.

Richard Pops, CEO of Alkermes

“We’ve been hammering hard on building this CNS [central nervous system] drug pipeline, and this is one example,” says Alkermes CEO Richard Pops. “Big Pharma isn’t doing much in CNS anymore, but the unmet need there is still vast.”

In terms of this experiment, Pops says, “we’d never argue this is definitive, but it certainly explains to our shareholders why we’d go into a Phase II trial in schizophrenia patients.”

Many other pharmaceutical companies have experimented with new and improved versions of olanzapine, but none are thought to be as far along in development, Pops says. Israel-based Teva Pharmaceutical has expressed interest in the field publicly, he says.